The Last Wave By
by Memoirs of a Dream
Summary: Sequel to Rage, Rage. Part 2 of 3. "Remember how I used to say I needed you? I lied. I will never need you. And I will never love you."


_A/N: If you recognize it, I don't own it. I had such fun with Rage, Rage that I decided to make it a mini-series. The final part is already in the works._

_My thanks go to The White Leopard for a really excellent beta job!_

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><p><strong>The Last Wave By<strong>

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><p><em>Angry<em>. He was so angry. He was angry at the pain which consumed his frail human body. He was angry at his body for being unable to cope as well as the body he remembered so clearly, but had never had. He was angry at whatever had caused him this pain, whatever had tried to destroy the fragile existence he nonetheless clung to with everything he had. And he was angry at the darkness which pressed in all around him, seeking to stifle him, seeking to silence him.

His single heart contracted with a wrench, sending spasms of agony throughout his body. His back arched, straining against whatever soft surface was beneath him until the bonds holding him down snapped off. He could feel himself screaming, voicing his pain and anger, but he couldn't hear anything. Even so, he didn't stop it, couldn't stop it, wouldn't have stopped it even if he had been capable, until he could force no more air from his aching lungs. Hands grabbed him, pressing down on his chest, closing around his arms, but he lashed out and fought them off. He was gasping, trying to take in enough oxygen to satisfy his heaving lungs.

He reached up to clutch at his chest, ripping away the things stuck to his skin and tearing at the strips of coarse cloth that were wrapped around his torso, heedless of everything but the heart that pounded so agonizingly quickly in his chest. None of the rest of the pain mattered.

His head ached with a high, constant drone, bouncing around the walls of his mind and driving him slowly mad. His body burned and there were tiny, sharp things digging into his arms, into his skin like little knives, every time he moved, but it didn't matter. He had to move, had to struggle and fight, because if he didn't fight then he couldn't breathe, and his heart – his heart – _his heart_…

"Jason!"

Soft hands came to rest on his face, one on each cheek. Something about the sensation of that touch, the hands shockingly cold on his fevered skin, relaxed all of his muscles instantly. He pulled one more desperate breath and collapsed back, panting desperately to get the air he needed but unable to fight any longer. His heart still raced under his fingers but it was bearable now, no longer beating as if it were going to explode. Those hands were all he could focus on, all he knew and all he cared about in that moment. His hands closed around the delicate wrists, keeping those hands pressed against his skin. Only then did he become aware that his fingers were covered in something warm and wet and sticky. He could smell iron.

"Jason, can you open your eyes?"

Of course he could open his eyes; he wasn't an idiot. But it wouldn't do any good. The darkness was all around him, pressing in. Still, something told him he'd get no peace until he complied. He opened his eyes, instantly dispelling the blackness which had so oppressed him. He frowned, shaking his head and trying to force the world to stop swimming so that he could see clearly. There was a face above him, a face he knew he should have recognized.

"Are you back with us now?"

"You…" He squinted, trying to make sense of his bleary vision. The word came out a croak. His throat was raw from screaming. His heart began pounding again. Jason closed his eyes and tipped his head back, gripping those wrists even tighter as he struggled to breathe and calm this pathetically human body down. He could feel fragile bones and shifting tendons inside his crushing grip, but there was not one word of complaint.

"It's alright, it's alright. You're gonna be okay," crooned a voice above him. "It's alright. Ride it out, you can do it." It hurt. It hurt worse than anything he had endured before, but slowly the pain abated. He opened his eyes again and finally found that he could recognize the face and voice.

Immediately, his eyes hardened. He unclenched his grip on her wrists and shoved her hands roughly away. He could already see bruising where he had grabbed her so desperately. Her skin was smeared with his blood.

Jason raised his head with difficulty to take in himself and his surroundings. His chest had been bound with stout bandages, which he had torn off in his frenzy. He was bleeding. There was too much blood for him to pinpoint the wound, but it must have been bad. The walls around him were stark and white and reeked of antiseptic. He was in a hospital. Why was he in a hospital?

The blonde beside him pressed a button on the bed and asked for a nurse to bring in some bandages to replace the ones he'd torn.

The effort of keeping his head up was quickly exhausting him. Jason let his head fall back as a woman in scrubs opened the door. She sat him up, propped against a mountain of pillows, and efficiently replaced the torn, bloodied bandages with fresh ones. His eyes continued to roam the room, taking in the monitors surrounding him. Some of them were currently useless, since he'd pulled off the sensors hooked to them. They, he realized, were the source of that horrible droning noise as they tried in vain to get a reading on him. Remnants of gaffer tape stuck to his wrists, probably part of someone's effort to keep him from causing himself more damage. An IV drip was attached to each arm; the flesh around them was purplish black, heavily bruised. The needle would have cut through all sorts of little blood vessels while he fought against nothing.

The nurse finished and helped him lay back again. Jason stared at each piece of equipment, cataloging their function in his mind. Further observations were made suddenly impractical by the damp cloth which settled over his eyes, courtesy of the blonde sitting beside him. As much as he hated to accept her help, the cool cloth felt wonderful on his hot face. He left it.

"What are you doing here?" he asked shortly. Rose sighed.

"The doctors let me in because you were having a fit. They seemed to think that I could calm you down."

Jason grunted. If anything, having her around only made him angrier – _more_ likely to fight, not less.

"How long have I been here?" was his next question.

"Three days. This is the first time you've been fully conscious. You…" He heard her take a deep breath. He also heard her voice shaking. "You almost died twice in surgery. They weren't sure you were going to make it at all. And they definitely didn't expect you to wake up so soon."

Died. He'd almost died. The simple way she presented this fact shocked him to the core and numbed him to the reality of it. Jason drew a shaky breath.

"How?" he asked.

"You don't remember?"

She shouldn't sound so surprised, he thought. He'd hardly be asking if he remembered, would he? His displeasure must have shown on his face.

"It was a bullet," she told him quietly. "To the chest. It only… it barely missed your heart, Jason. You got really lucky."

Someone had shot him. That explained a lot. It didn't explain everything, though. His stubbornness wouldn't allow him to ask further, but she had no such inhibitions. It was just as well; not asking didn't mean he didn't want to know.

She slid the warm, damp cloth off of his eyes. Jason blinked once and then shut his eyes against the sterile hospital light. "They – people at Torchwood, I mean – they think I was the target, not you. It would make sense if I had a price on my head, with Dad being in charge, but you…" She shook her head and took an ice pack out of the small fridge, wrapping it in a thin towel for insulation before laying it over his eyes. "You're an IT whiz for a minor bank, not a Torchwood operative. No one should be out to get you."

"So why aren't _you_ the one laying here?" he spat.

"Because you stepped in the way," Rose told him simply. As she said it, he remembered seeing the gunman leveling the weapon. Shoving Rose aside was the natural thing to do, even if it meant placing himself in the line of fire. Resentment welled up in his chest, swamping over him in one great, hot wave of fury.

"It wouldn't be the first time you've gotten me killed," he growled. She made a small, strangled noise that he knew meant he had hit home. He embraced his renewed anger, scowling blackly as it washed over him. He wanted to blame her for his stupidity. He wanted to blame Him, the Doctor. He wanted to say that it had been an accident, or a reflex, or an impulse driven by remnants of the Doctor's love for her. He _wanted_ to say that he, Jason Watson, would have been happier to let the shooter kill her.

He wanted to blame _her_. But he couldn't, not really, not in the privacy of his own mind.

Because Rose was the one that defined him, he realized. The sudden revelation, presented so clearly and simply in his mind, made him feel sick. For nearly a year he had been striving, day and night, with every breath he took, to be his own person. Day and night, with every breath he took, he had sought to stand on his own, independent of the Doctor – the man whose shadow he knew he could never escape. He had worked so hard to be everything that the Doctor wasn't. He was stationary. He was successful. He understood the world and the culture, not just the history.

And none of it mattered because it wasn't the Doctor who trapped him, not really. It was Rose. She was the one who had shaped him into who he was. Somehow, she had become his reason for living, for carrying on day to day despite his absolute contempt for this kind of life. He'd thought he was his own man, but he was wrong. He was hers, like a dog on a leash. And the worst part – oh, the _worst_ part was that he couldn't even _blame_ her for it because she didn't know. The stupid, manipulative human girl had insinuated herself right into the very fibers of who he was to the point where he would rather _die_ than live without her, and she didn't even _know_.

"Jason, calm down – Jason, breathe, come on – " He _was_ breathing, great rasping gasps that wracked his entire body and made his chest ache and his stomach heave.

"I don't love you," he gasped, pouring all of his resentment into the words. "I don't need you – I don't, I _don't_ – Leave me alone! I don't need you!" But as much as he hated himself, as much as he hated this… _dependence_, and as much as he wanted to hate her, he couldn't. He wouldn't love her, but he couldn't hate her. He couldn't because he would have no purpose without her. He hadn't been created for her, wasn't made to be her plaything or her pet, but somehow … somehow, she had become the reason he existed. She was integral to his very being, as much as his own heart. He wasn't his own person. He could never be his own person because he could never function apart from her.

"But I need you."

Her voice was small and weak as she said it. Jason gritted his teeth, furious. His stomach heaved again and, this time, he rolled away from her and vomited over the side of the bed, spitting bile onto the previously clean floor. The violent peristalsis rolled through him again and again, leaving him retching long after his stomach was empty. Rose tried to rub his back, tried to comfort and calm him, but he blindly shoved her away. No longer was he going to let her get close. He had to break the attachments between them before it was too late, before he could _never_ belong to himself.

Rose waited silently for him to finish. When he fell back onto the mattress, exhausted, she silently handed him a glass of water. He drank it, washing the sour taste of acid from his mouth, and set the empty cup on the bedside table.

"I was… thinking," Rose ventured after a long, tense silence. "Thinking we could… travel. You know, together, like we used to. I know it wouldn't really be the same, but -"

"Shut up."

"I'm sorry?"

"Shut up," he repeated forcefully. "I'm not him. I have never been him and I don't _want_ to be him. I don't _care_ about any of that. You really are _stupid_, aren't you?"

"Why would you say that?" Rose asked, heartbreak in her voice and betrayal on her face. That was the reaction he wanted, but Jason wasn't finished yet. He sat up straighter, twisting himself around to meet her eyes while he spoke. He wanted her to see just how serious he was.

"Remember how I used to say I needed you? I lied. I don't need a babysitter and I definitely don't need one as simple-minded as you! I will _never_ need you! And I will never love you. The sooner you get that into your head, the better!"

Every word was precisely calculated to hurt her, to make her hate him, to make her _want_ to leave, because then it would be much easier for him to hate her in return.

He reached up and clutched his heart as it began to pound. It contracted painfully with each beat, a kind of pain left over from his birth that always consumed him – and doubly so now, when he was still so pathetically weak. He curled in on himself, hating again his fragile body. Rose wrapped her arms around him, wanting to whisper soothing things to him and help him through his troubles.

Jason shoved her away so forcefully that she stumbled back.

"Why won't you – " she began to say, but he cut her off.

"I hate you," he snarled. "Don't _touch_ me, don't _ever_ touch me again, have you got that? Get out of here. Leave me alone – I said _alone_!" He added the last part as she tried to step toward him, his hand slashing through the air between them.

"I love you," she said. It seemed sometimes that she only knew how to say those three words. "I promised I would always be here for you."

"I don't care," he snapped. "Get out. Leave me alone! I don't need you anymore and I will never, _never_ love you!"

He could see it in her eyes – he could see that he'd just broken her heart. And he sneered, allowing himself to feel nothing but anger and contempt towards her – and never allowing himself to look past that anger for fear of what he would find.

He clutched his heart again and curled around himself until he was unaware of anything but the pain. When finally his heart slowed and he could look up, Rose was gone.

She didn't return.

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><p>Two weeks later, Jason was declared fit to be discharged. It had been a long two weeks. Every moment was tedious and filled with sharp, unrelenting pain. Rose never came back. He had expected her to come storming in the very next day, her face set with the determination to stay beside him no matter what, but she didn't. Jason had well and truly cut all ties between them.<p>

Despite that, he still felt dissatisfied. He still felt… stifled, as if something was slowly choking him.

Walking home from work one day, Jason realized the problem. He had worked for two agonizing years to become everything that the Doctor was not, but some things were too deeply ingrained for him to be rid of. The Time Lord's wanderlust now plagued _him_. He couldn't escape the need to travel, and so he didn't try.

That day, Jason shoved some clothes into a cheap second-hand knapsack. He walked down the corridor to Rose's flat and dropped his keys into her mail slot. And he left a note on his kitchen table.

_Travelling_.

But that was wrong, wasn't it? He wasn't travelling. Travelling wasn't the right word anymore. He crossed it out with one smooth line and wrote a new word beneath it:

_Running._

Jason shouldered his knapsack and never looked back.


End file.
